Customer Reviews

Chemical Separations: Principles, Techniques and Experiments (Techniques in Analytical Chemistry)

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Any chemist can mix reagents and run a reaction. The challenge is to get the desired compound out of the reaction pot. It is a measure of the chemist's skill to separate the product from the liquor. This book will teach a chemist and other scientists how to purify the product.

Meloan provides a fairly comprehensive array of purification techniques. The level of each subject is beyond what one would see in an undergraduate organic chemistry course, but not so in depth that the practicing chemist must be a PhD. in analytical chemistry. In other words, the book is designed to teach a chemist how to work at the bench. Theoretical principles of each separation technique are explained, problems are provided to ensure your understanding, and there are simple demonstrations for each technique. It would be difficult to cover the book completely (doing all the demonstrations) in a year.

Should a student (graduate, self-teaching, or undergraduate) go through all the purification techniques listed, he would have great bench top skills and be able to use most equipment (to include glassware) available in labs.

The book is challenged with some of the author's explanations. Sometimes Meloan's explanations can be obtuse, and I spent considerable time figuring out concepts. To some degree this is a matter of getting used to his writing style, as the information is usually present somewhere in the text; the dots are often not connected for the reader. Some of the pictures are hard to see; the book is black and white and the pictures look mimeographed. Many of the drawings are done by hand and lack key descriptions to help the reader understand the importance of the drawing. When bound, the printer did a substandard job.

But, for all its warts, this is a book all graduate students in organic and inorganic chemistry should have and master. I also recommend this for graduate students going into sciences wherein they must be able to extract compounds and do basic analysis (food science, botany, soils science, environmental science, etc.).

I've spent some time looking for other books like this, and there simply aren't any currently in print. There are several from the 1960's and 1970's that are great manuals, but are not in print. If you need a book to teach you how to separate compounds from a reaction pot, natural product, or food, this is the book for you. If you're an analytical chemist who wants an in-depth, mathematically oriented text, there are hundreds of books that will meet your need out there; this book probably doesn't have enough math for the doctor in analytical chemistry.